1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and devices for mobile telecommunications systems and, more particularly, to methods and devices for locating and providing enhanced response to an emergency identified by a 911 mobile telecommunications caller.
2. Description of the Related Art
A mission of a 911 emergency system is to provide, in the shortest possible time, a response team well informed concerning an emergency and composed of emergency personnel having the appropriate skills to respond to the emergency. Today, the threat of a sudden terrorist attack and criminal violence against any part of our society (e.g., by snipers, gunmen, bombers, and those seeking to unleash weapons of mass destruction including quantities of biological agents, toxins or radiation), places the utmost importance on providing a quick and thoughtfully assembled response team of law enforcement, emergency medical service, and other emergency personnel to prevent catastrophic damage or loss of life. One key to a quick and properly formulated emergency response lies in the accuracy and speed of passage of information concerning the emergency to the appropriate emergency personnel, including dedicated on-site security personnel.
Many resources have been committed to better intelligence, increased security around high profile targets, border security, first responder equipment and training, etc. However, one defense asset that has not been fully exploited at this time is the national cellular system. The “eyes and ears” of the millions of mobile phone users in this country are an existing resource for round-the-clock surveillance across the entire nation. To benefit from this surveillance, all security personnel and law enforcement must be better networked to provide a faster reactionary force against terrorist or criminal attacks. As discussed herein, it is possible to significantly improve the responses to a 911 call and also allow for additional services in both distributed and centralized awareness and tracking of all types of emergencies.
A typical scenario for receiving a wireless 911 call on a cellular network system in response to a threat is illustrated in FIG. 1A. FIG. 1A illustrates a basic 911 wireless cellular response scenario in which a 911 caller talks to a 911 dispatcher who locates the caller through discussion and review of available location data, interprets the emergency, and then notifies the appropriate first responder organization. The response time to arrive at the location of the 911 caller is dependent on the technology of the 911 dispatch center and the readiness and location of the actual response team.
In particular, in FIG. 1A, a 911 call 6, made by a person 8 in response to a threat 10, is transmitted to a cellular tower 12. The 911 call 6 is then routed to a 911 dispatcher 14 who receives the 911 call, speaks with the person 8 and, in turn, relays the nature of the emergency to emergency personnel such as those at a police station 16 and others 18, for example, those at a fire station. Also, the 911 dispatcher 14 may directly contact individual police or security officials 20 via, for example, radio communication 22, or the security officials may instead be contacted by, for example, a police station dispatcher such as by radio communication 22′, adding an additional layer of communication. Once the 911 dispatcher 14 understands the emergency and contacts appropriate first responder organizations, calls may or may not be made to on-site personnel. Thus, significant delays can occur before an emergency is actually dealt with. However, it will be appreciated that across the United States, the technical sophistication of the 911 dispatch and the emergency personnel organizations can vary from highly networked/computerized centers to low-budget operations adding additional decision and communication time and even introducing the possibility of communication errors.
In the past, the biggest problem with an emergency call from a cellular phone was that the 911 dispatcher did not know the location of the caller, who frequently could not provide adequate location information. In an effort to improve the response time for wireless 911 calls, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has promulgated enhanced 911 (E-911) mandates, which provide each 911 dispatcher with automatic location identification (ALI) (i.e., additional geographic location information) on the wireless 911 calls. The basic 911 rules require wireless carriers to transmit all 911 calls to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) 254 (see FIG. 4) without regard to subscriber validation, and all wireless handsets must have the capability to process 911 calls such that the calls may be handled by any available carrier.
The E-911 program has evolved in two phases. The E-911 Phase I program required that by 1998, the carrier had to be capable of providing the PSAP 254 with the telephone number of the 911 caller and the location of the cell site or base station (BS) receiving the call. This is typically done by the wireless provider furnishing the PSAP 254 with the antenna face sector width and range characteristics for plotting on geographic information system (GIS) maps so that notification by the mobile switching center (MSC) to the PSAP of the affected antenna face allows the PSAP 254 to observe the location area for the 911 caller calling from a mobile system (MS), although, the precise location of the emergency must be supplied by a description from the caller.
The Phase II Program requires that the location of a wireless 911 caller is to be identified, without a description from a wireless 911 caller, by providing the PSAP 254 with the geographic location coordinates of the 911 caller. This may be achieved by precision ranging measurements combined with sophisticated algorithms for the accurate calculation of latitude and longitude of the MS. The Phase II program allows the carrier to achieve 95% of subscriber usage of ALI handsets by December 2005, or 50% of coverage area with network-based ALI accuracies by October 2001 (with 100% coverage area at a later approved date).
The ALI location accuracies for the E-911 Phase I program are typically met by the cellular network notifying the PSAP of the base station, cell, or antenna sector that is receiving the 911 call. The PSAP 254 uses this information along with additional information about the shape and range of the particular cellular coverage area to approximately locate the 911 caller. The location of the caller is greatly improved in the E-911 Phase II system by requiring very precise ALI location accuracies, including handset ALI solutions with 50 meters location accuracy for 67% of calls and 150 meters for 95% of calls, and network-based ALI solutions with 100 meters location accuracy for 67% of calls and 300 meters location accuracy for 95% of calls. It should be noted, however, that Phase II ALI compliance can be met by many different techniques for locating a wireless 911 caller, including either a BS network measurement (e.g., time difference of arrival, angle of arrival, signal pattern matching, etc.), handset measurement using, for example, assisted global positioning satellite (a-GPS) or enhanced observed time delay (EOTD), or hybrid combinations of the measurement techniques.
Each technique for locating a wireless 911 caller has many technological issues that limit its usefulness or application within the U.S. However, a-GPS and hybrid solutions are considered today to be the most promising solutions, particularly with regard to reception in urban locations and buildings. It is also expected that the handset ALI accuracies will be well within FCC requirements, as evidenced by a six-month test by the FCC in 1999 that resulted in an average accuracy of 22 meters. As reported in the March 2003 GPS World Magazine, more than 10 million handsets with built-in GPS chipsets have been sold in the previous 18 months and hundreds of millions of handsets with GPS are expected within the next several years because of the E-911 mandate.
The goal of the FCC since 1996 has been to improve the process of locating the 911 caller through the E-911 mandates for ALI technology. Precise location of the 911 caller significantly improves the response time of an emergency team to the site of the 911 caller. However, the addition of the present invention (also referred to as the Localized Cellular Awareness and Tracking of Emergencies (LoCATE) System) will allow a much faster initial response by on-site security or nearby law enforcement while the emergency team is in transit. In the case of terrorist or criminal attack, the result could be significantly reduced loss of life or property due to the ability to capitalize both on a real-time communication link to on-site security/law enforcement and the ability to tailor on-site surveillance zones for optimum responses to an expected attack.
While, as described above, efforts are underway to reduce the time required to identify a location of a wireless 911 caller and to route the call to a particular emergency agency in a particular service zone, it is seen that a further effort is required to provide, in the shortest possible time, a response team well informed concerning an emergency and that is composed of emergency personnel having the appropriate skills to respond. A special consideration for terrorist attack or any situation where human life is highly endangered is the notification of on-site security personnel which typically are not highly prioritized in the 911 dispatch process. In addition to improving the response time of emergency personnel, the invention, summarized below, would allow a cellular provider to recover costs through a fee-for-service to security organizations in businesses and institutions.